The Dictionary of Human Geography (127 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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mode of production
Karl Marx refined ?mode of production' to explain determinate ways of harnessing social labour to the trans formation of nature. Nonetheless, Marx and Engels use the concept variously: sometimes as a unity in tension between ?forces of production? (technology, materials, human environment relations) that fetter the transformation of ?relations of production? (PROPERTy, work, law, class); while elsewhere, well known pas sages from the Communist manifesto lend weight to an epochal, teleological interpretation of suc cessive modes, including primitive communism, SLAVERy, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and, finally, communism. Marx?s Capital sys tematically explores the dynamics of one mode of production, through commodities pro duced by ?free labor': dually freed from the means of production of necessities for survival, and free to sell all they have left, their capacity to labour, without obligations from workplace or employer. On this exploitation, Capital constructs ramifying, spiralling, an archic forces of innovation, class struggle, crisis, resolution and destruction dynamics long debated as periodic or catastrophic (see dialectic). Twentieth century orthodox Marxists carried the burden that precise deter mination of the mode had vital political effects. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This orthodoxy was called into question, at least ?West? of the Iron Curtain, through the revisionist marxisms of the 1970s. The revival of ?modes of production? in the plural spoke to new exigencies: British Marxists broke with Stalinism and evolutionism, as social history reopened histories of transition to capitalism; scholars of decolonization and develop (NEW PARAGRAPH) MENT in AFRICA, LATIN AMERICA and ASIA (NEW PARAGRAPH) questioned the politics and political econ OMy of peasantries (see peasant) in relation to capitalism and imperialism; and Marxist feminists questioned agrarian households? in ternal and external relations to MARkETS (see agrarian quESTlON). A translation of Marx?s (1857) ?Introduction? to his Grundrisse exem plified a hinge between his early and late thought, calling into question an economistic, mature Marx. Passages from Marx?s corpus were re read with an eye to ?subsumption' and persisting relations between modes of produc tion. In debate with radical DEPENDENcy and world sysTEMS theorists, French structuralists (see structuralism) in particular, the philo sophers Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, economic anthropologists Claude Meillassoux and Maurice Godelier, and sociologist Nicos Poulantzas conceived of internally systematic modes ?structured in dominance'. Debates in Economy and Society, collected in Wolpe (1980) including Wolpe?s own classic article on South Africa questioned the historical and political articulation between the reproduc tion of capitalism and that of subordinate, pre capitalist modes within the social formation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Eric Wolf?s (1982) critique of Marxist struc turalism appealed instead to consciousness and historical diversity, to show how ?people without a history' organized capitalist, tribu tary and kin ordered modes of production in relation to a diffusing global capitalism. Talal Asad (1987) questions Wolf?s recourse to ?permanent criteria' in distinguishing modes rather than explaining complex histories of articulation to the unequally global history of capitalism. Instead, ?articulation' would have to contend with traditions, constructions, aspirations and conditions through which people could or could not participate in ?mak ing history'. Central to work in this vein since has been Stuart Hall's (1980) reworking of ?articulation' as both ?joining up' and ?giving expression to': a Gramsican analytic that he uses to explain state sanctioned racism as one form of cultural, material and political articu lation of multiple modes. sc (NEW PARAGRAPH)
model
An idealized and structured repre sentation of (part of) the world (cf. abstrac tion; ideal TyPE). Model building has a long history in many sciences, but its formal and conscious incorporation into GEOGRAPHy is usually attributed to attempts to establish geography as a spatial science in the 1960s and 1970s. Scientificity was central to the benchmark collection of essays edited by R.J. Chorley and P. Haggett as Models in geography (1967). They treated models as ?selective approximations which, by the elimination of incidental detail [or ?noise'] allow some fun damental, relevant or interesting aspects of the real world to appear in some generalized form'. The accent on generalization was vital to their project, and this was achieved thro ugh visual geometric representations of spa tial structures and through mathematical statistical generation of spatial patterns. The twentieth anniversary of the original Models was marked by an international conference attended by both revisionists who sought to rethink and revitalize the project and dissidents who were sceptical of its ability to address what they regarded as more important questions. On one side, Harvey claimed that ?those who have stuck with modelling since those heady days have largely been able to do so by restricting the nature of the questions they ask?. To Cosgrove, modelling was the quintessential expression of high MOdERNlSM, and the privilege it accorded to abstraction, functionality, generalization and simplicity was altogether incapable of responding to the challenge of dlffERENCE in a late modern, even POSTMOdERN, world. On the other side were a large number of unrepentant spatial scientists who had no time for such concerns, and who reaffirmed their faith in the central, instrumental importance of formal model ling. The publication of these exchanges two years later, as Remodelling geography (Macmillan, 1989) coincided with a radically different collection edited by R. Peet and N. Thrift entitled New models in geography (1989). Their subtitle indicated a tectonic shift in the foundations of model building: ?the political economy perspective? signalled a range of dif ferent approaches that had a common ground ing in various forms of political ECONOMy, CRITICAL SOCIAL ThEORy and hISTORICAL MAT (NEW PARAGRAPH) erialism. Partly as a consequence, the original claim for analytical model building as the cen tral object of geographical enquiry was displa ced and efforts were directed towards methods as means rather than ends in themselves. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since then, however, the prospectus advanced by Haggett and Chorley has been renewed in two ways. First, model building had been advanced as (at least in part) a solu tion to an exploding data matrix: the architects of the model based PARAdlGM insisted that geographers had no choice but to move beyond the accumulation of ?facts? that had reduced their field to an endlessly enlarging global gazetteer, with no clear logic of selec tion or organization. Since then, however, the development of electronic modes of data stor age and retrieval, analysis and display most visibly through GEOGRAPhIC INfORMATION sysTEMS has provided much more sophisti cated algorithms for data management. Sec ond, model building was originally advertised as a necessary moment in the ?puzzle solving? activity required for the inauguration of a new, properly scientific, paradigm for geographical enquiry: ?That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight,? Haggett and Chor ley reminded their readers, ?is not discovered till the order is looked for.? Since then, many human geographers have been drawn to forms of cultural and social theory that insist on the radical non innocence of just ?looking?, and NON REPRESENTATIONAL ThEORy, POST (NEW PARAGRAPH) structuralism and science STUdiES (among others) have directed attention towards the ways in which ideas and images enter directly into the very constitution the ?ordering? of the world. dG (NEW PARAGRAPH)
modernism
Strategies of representation closely identified with late nineteenth and twentieth century movements in the arts that challenged the conventions of romanticism and realism. There are many modernisms, but Lunn (1985) identified four common preoccupations: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Aesthetic self consciousness. ?Modern art ists, writers and composers often draw attention to the media or materials with which they are working? and in doing so emphasize that their work is a fabrication in the literal sense of ?something made?; they thus seek to escape from the idea of art as a direct reflection of the world (cf. mimesis). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Simultaneity and juxtaposition. Modern ism often disrupts, weakens or dissolves temporal structure in favour of simultan eity: different perspectives are often juxt aposed within the same frame or narrative. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. Mod ernism often explores ?the paradoxical many sidedness of the world?: instead of an omniscient narrator, for example, modernist writers may use multiple points of view. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The demise of the centred subject. Modern ism often exposes and disrupts the fiction of the sovereign individual or the ?inte grated subject?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modernism did not emerge in a vacuum: it was a critical response to a series of crises within capitalist MOdERNlTy. Its coordinates included: the explosive growth of modern cit ies and the radical transformation of their built forms, economies and cultures; the restructuring of European capitalism, espe cially through the Agricultural Depression at the end of the nineteenth century and the intensified technical changes brought about by a new round of iNdUSTRlALizATlON; the ag gressive advance of European colonialism and imperialism; and the turbulence of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. This mapping has three implications of direct relevance to hUMAN GEOGRAPhy: (NEW PARAGRAPH) These episodes involved significant changes in conceptions of time and space in the west (Kern, 1983) which also had dramatic repercussions far beyond the shores of europe and North America. Huyssen (2007) insists that modernism ?cut across? imperial and post imperial cultures it included Baudelaire?s Paris and Joyce?s Dublin, but also Borges? Buenos Aires and Kahlo?s Mexico City so that ?metropolitan culture was trans lated, appropriated and creatively mim icked in colonized and post colonial countries in asia, africa and Latin america?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The ways in which these changes were (NEW PARAGRAPH) registered in the arts, literature and else where were profoundly gendered and sexualized. ?The territory of modernism,? Pollock (1988, p. 54) argues, ?so often is a way of dealing with masculine sexuaL ity and its sign, the bodies of women?. Representations of modern spaces were made to revolve around masculine subject positions like the mobile figure of the flAneur and to privilege en (NEW PARAGRAPH) counters ?between men who have the freedom to take their pleasures in many urban spaces and women from a class subject to them who have to work in those spaces often selling their bodies to clients or to artists?. Indeed, Lefebvre?s account of the production of space, which was partly inspired by his encoun ters with surrealism and the Situationists, repeatedly draws attention to the signifi cance of modernism for the triumph of a ?visual phallic geometric space?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Modernism was connected not only to experimentation in the arts, but also to new styles of philosophical reflection and to the formation of the social sciences (including cRiticaL theory and Western MARxism, Lunn?s primary concern). But most of these intellectual projects retained the social markings, marginal izations and exclusions written into metropolitan modernism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lunn?s characterizations work best when applied to modern art and Literature and probably have less purchase on modern archi tecture, which has its own chronologies (Frampton, 1992). These architectural motifs assumed a wider significance in the 1950s and 1960s, when a high modernism emerged as a dominant cultural thematic, distinguished by what BÂÂ81rger (1992) described as a ?pathos of purity?. ?In the same way as architecture divested itself of ornamental elements,? he argued, so ?painting freed itself from the pri macy of the representational, and the nouveau roman liberated itself from the categories of traditional fiction (plot and character).? In much the same way, too, spatial science divested human geography of an interest in the particularities of areal DlffERENTlATlON, which became so much ?surface noise?, in order to reveal the purity of geometric form and spatial structure (often, like architec ture, cast in terms of fUNCTlONALlSM). It would not be difficult to present other high modernist movements in social thought in much the same way, notably structuralism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From such a perspective, postmodernism becomes a critique of high modernism rather than of modernism tout court. It contains im portant echoes of the early twentieth century avant garde, and a number of writers have urged the reclamation of that earlier modern ism as an indispensable moment in the formu lation of critical social theory. In fact, Berman (NEW PARAGRAPH) suggests that it had its roots even earl ier, in the nineteenth century writings of Baudelaire and Marx, both of whom (in dif ferent ways) sought to come to terms with a world in which ?all that is solid melts into air?. Those human geographers most invested in these reclamation projects have paid close attention to the historical geographical coord inates of modernism (above). Thus Harvey (1989b) sought to expose some of the connec tions between the cultural formations of modernism, the experience of time space compression and the changing political econ omy of capitalism, which in turn provoked a critique of the ways in which his own repre sentations erased the characteristic gendering and sexualization of their maps of modernity (Deutsche, 1996c). There have also been specific studies: Harvey?s (2003a) excavation of modernism and its material foundations in nineteenth century Paris, and Pinder?s (2005c) exploration of forms of utopian modernism in the twentieth century (see situationism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the most deliberately modernist contri butions to contemporary human geography are to be found in the work of Gunnar Olsson and Allan Pred. Pred?s experimental studies of European modernities (1995) and his extraor dinary re creation of a ?heart of darkness? at the very centre of ?Swedish modern? (2004) were freely informed by the example of Walter Benjamin; they beautifully exemplify all four of Lunn?s diagnostics (above) and the radical, critical impulse of early modernism that (NEW PARAGRAPH) Berman so admires. In a transposed key, Olsson?s (2007) critique of CARTOGRAPhic reason recalls those earlier modernisms too, and stages crucial encounters with the art of Duchamp, Malevich and Rothko; but its care ful minimalism also reinscribes the pathos of high modernism in a newly critical register. Taken together, these thought works show that modernism still has much to contribute to the jaded critical cultures of human geog raphy (and much more besides). dG (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Brooker and Thacker (2005); Harvey (1989a, chs. 2, 16). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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